


Umbra

by Rotpeach



Category: Boyfriend to Death (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cannibalism, Disembowelment, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Fairy Tale Elements, Other, Possessive Behavior, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:27:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: Shadows are clingy, needy things that are seldom given a second thought, but it is frightening to suddenly lose one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote a thing that was (incredibly) loosely inspired by some talk about grimm fairy tales and got a little carried away with the idea
> 
> the beginning concept was drawn from hans christian andersens "the shadow" but its become another beast altogether i think lol

“I don’t like them,” Strade growls in your ear, but you pretend you can’t hear him over the deep, pounding bass and shrill electronic noise coming from the dance floor. You just want a minute to yourself right now, you want to have something that’s yours and yours alone and not have to share it like you do everything else. The stranger whose eye you’ve caught winks at you across from across the club, and you try to ignore Strade’s nails raking down your back in warning, incorporeal, passing through your clothes and leaving faint lines on your skin. 

“Selfish,” he hisses. 

You don’t care. 

Usually you’d be afraid, but you’re emboldened by a bit of alcohol and the moving throng of people around you who neither see nor hear him, passing through him with little more than a shiver. You know he hates this but he drove you to it, he made you desperate enough that your desire for a bit of independence is greater than your fear of retaliation. 

You take a step towards the attractive stranger, struggling against Strade trying to pull you back, digging his claws into your shoulders. “You’ll regret it,” he tells you, eyes flashing menacingly. “I’ll make you regret it.”

You don’t listen. 

“Hey,” the stranger says, smiling invitingly. “You new here? I haven’t seen you before.”

You laugh. “Yeah, I am.”

They don’t see Strade standing beside you, lit by the strobe lights flashing across the club, a warped silhouette or vague shape of a person glaring sharply, eyes yellow with slit pupils. His fingers are wrapped around your forearm, grip bruising and possessive, and they might’ve been able to see the shape of a hand pressed into your skin if not for how dark it is. 

“You wanna dance?” they ask.

Strade doesn’t speak. He knows you’re ignoring him. He doesn’t like it, but he’s stewing silently now. That makes you worry, but you told yourself you’re still going through with this. You want this. You’re tired of sharing.

“Yeah,” you say.

The music gets a little quieter, transitioning to the intro of a new song. You follow the stranger into the crowd, and for the briefest of moments, you can’t feel Strade. You look back over your shoulder, the sudden separation making your breath catch in your throat and your heart pound in your chest. You frantically search the room for him and you find him against the back wall, in a void that even the neon lights can’t brighten, eyes narrowed, teeth showing in a wicked grin. You shiver and turn away.

It’s just a reflex, a bad habit from a lonely childhood. You don’t need him anymore, you tell yourself.

Fishnet and leather-clad bodies fill the space between you until you can’t see him, and you quell the panic within you by going to the stranger holding out a hand. 

You’re okay. You think you will be.  _ You don’t need him anymore. _

You don’t even know where Strade is, but you hear his voice echo in your head,

_ “Yes, you do.” _

*

You are born with Strade the same way others are born with freckles; as a matter of circumstance, as part of you, as something you accept without question.

He comes home with you from the hospital, leans over your crib and watches you for hours. Your earliest memory is of his eyes glowing in the dark, yellow and soft like a nightlight. When you first try to walk on your weak and shaky legs, he is there to catch you when you stumble—though he does let you fall at times, because he believes being hurt will help you grow. He is in every family photo, a translucent shape beside you or an orb of light above your head, always present, always watching, always listening. He does not always look the same.

(Your parents liked to brag about how you never made a fuss or cried in the night, how easily entertained you were, how they barely had to watch you because of how well you took care of yourself.

Their confidence turned to negligence, and when they were gone in the night, your wails filled the empty house. Strade crept in on more legs than you thought people were supposed to have—though you were too young to count or quantify, so this was really only a guess—and his smile always quieted your sobs.)

When your first baby tooth begins to wiggle in the socket, your mother tells you that soon you’ll be able to put it under the pillow and the tooth fairy will come to get it. You’re excited at the prospect of fairies, but Strade is not.

“There’s no such thing, buddy,” he says, seated at the foot of your bed as a thing of darkness and shadow with too many voices, giving off black smoke that dissipates before it reaches the ceiling. He is small but still bigger than you, the appropriate size for an older brother, his boyish grin a disembodied mouth full of sharp teeth in a void that serves as his face. “So why don’t you give it to me instead?”

You frown. “Why do you want it?” you ask, prodding at the loose tooth with the tip of your tongue. 

Strade tilts his head and his form wavers, flicking in and out of existence. “Because I want to keep part of you.” He pokes your cheek, but when you try to swat his hand away in annoyance, your fingers go right through him. “You’re going to grow up someday,” he says. “You’ll make new friends and you won’t want me around anymore.”

“I won’t,” you say stubbornly. 

“You might,” he warns. “And then I’ll be sad. I might forget about you, too.”

“No, you won’t!” You bite your lip, upset that he’d even suggest it. “You can have my tooth if you promise you’ll always, always be with me.” 

Strade smiles and ruffles your hair. “I promise,” he says. He’s closer suddenly, prying your jaw open. Somewhere in the darkness, his eyes widen with glee. “Now hold still. This is going to hurt.”

Your screams echo down the hall. Before your parents have the chance to check on you, you run crying into their room, crawling into their bed as blood trickles out of the corner of your mouth. When they ask you what’s wrong, you just sob. It hurts too much to talk. Your mother tries to soothe you. Your father goes downstairs to find something to numb the pain. You open your mouth and they’re horrified to find four of your teeth missing.

You stay in their room for the night.

Strade stands next to the bed and looms over you, smiling, clutching your bloody teeth to his chest like they’re precious treasures.

“Sorry,” he says, and his voice is quiet but his words are spoken with excitement. “I really am. But I wanted them so bad. It was nice of you to give them to me.”

He reaches out with one clawed hand, shadows swirling around his fingers, and gently strokes your hair. You shiver and squeeze your eyes shut.

“I was just kidding,” he tells you. “I’ll never forget you, and you’ll never forget me.” He laughs. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere, buddy. Not now. Not ever.”

*

You can’t stop thinking about him.

You try not to, you try to throw yourself into this moment, try to lose yourself to it—press against the body of the stranger whose face you don’t really look at it, whose name you don’t know—but your eyes keep wandering back to the corner of the room and you can’t relax. 

You know he’s still there. He can’t be anywhere else. He can’t leave you, can’t exist without you.

And you think, at times, he’s wanted nothing more than to tear you into little pieces, but he’s always stopped short of destroying you completely. 

“Hey,” your dance partner says, startling you, “you okay?”

You give a weak apology and try to think of an excuse. The bass is overwhelming. The lights are too bright. You don’t want him next to you but you’re afraid to be alone. You grab them by the arm and pull them close, whispering, “You wanna get out of here?”

Their eyes light up and they eagerly follow you out of the club. The cold, night air hits your skin—a different kind of cold than him, less familiar, less comforting—and you shiver and walk closer to them, pressing your shoulder to theirs. They laugh and wrap an arm around you as you walk, but you’re still thinking of him, you’re still stuck in your childhood, still afraid of the dark even though he’s made of it, you’re still remembering the first time he said—

*

“I don’t like him,” whispered into your ear at the edge of the playground at recess as you watched your classmates playing kickball. 

The boy jogging over to the ball now pushed you off of the monkey bars ten minutes ago. Your skin scraped off on the pavement in rough patches, leaving flesh and blood behind, and you cried the whole way to the nurse’s office.

Like conjoined twins, you share everything—every accomplishment and failure, every moment of joy and sorrow—not because you want to, but because you have no choice. You think he can feel the pain, too, but you’ve never seen him cry. You think he likes it.

“You should teach him a lesson. Push him and see how he likes it.”

You look down at your shoes and kick a few pebbles around. “I don’t wanna get in trouble.”

Strade laughs. He’s taller now; he’s grown with you, always just a little bigger, a little stronger. He melts in the sunlight, dripping something black like tar and slick like ink all over the ground, but you don’t think anyone else sees it. “You won’t,” he assures you. “It’ll be fun.”

“I dunno….”

His fingers slide over you, cold and damp, as he slings an arm over your shoulder. “Want me to do it?”

“No….”

You hear the whoosh of something flying through the air seconds before the kickball collides with your face, knocking you flat on your back. You cry, clutching your crooked and bloody nose, and a few of your classmates run over to see if you’re okay. The boy who kicked it hasn’t moved, watching you from the other end of the playground neutrally.

(And maybe you misread his expression. Maybe he was scared and didn’t know what to say or do. Maybe he was afraid you’d be mad. 

He was right about one thing. You  _ were _ mad.)

“I told you, buddy,” Strade is saying, helping you sit up and wiping the blood from your face,

(you think he licked it off of his finger)

“He’s never going to learn. He thinks he can get away with whatever he wants.”

You sniffle, wiping at your eyes with your dirt-covered palms. Strade rubs your back, speaking lowly and calmly like he always does, trying to soothe you. 

“You don’t want him to do it again, do you?” he asks.

You shake your head, whimpering.

“You want him to know how it feels, right?”

You nod. 

“Here,” he says, taking your hand and pressing your palms together. You inhale sharply when he pricks your fingertips with his claws and you can’t pull away from him even when you try. Your eyes well up with fresh tears but he calls your name and your eyes meet his

(not of your own accord).

He gives you the same reassuring smile that lulled you to sleep as a baby, and you’re filled with calm. “Let me help you,” he says, and then he vanishes before your eyes, seeping into the cuts in your fingertips. You feel him running through your veins, looking out from behind your eyelids and breathing through your lungs. 

“Are you okay?” one of your classmates asks, offering a hand. You ignore it, getting to your feet on your own and jogging over to the boy standing by himself, fidgeting nervously. 

“I’m sorry,” he says guiltily, looking down at his feet. “I didn’t mean to. Are you mad?”

You smile at him. You don’t really feel like smiling, but you do it anyway. “No,” you say, and it’s a lie. You’re usually bad at lying but it comes easily now. 

“Really?” the boy asks, eyes brightening. 

“Yeah. Why would I be mad about that?” 

You’d been afraid; afraid of getting in trouble and being punished, afraid of getting hurt in the scuffle, afraid of what your parents would say. But Strade makes you fearless. The boy doesn’t expect it when you throw yourself at him, and he kicks and screams and cries.

It takes four people to pull you off of him.

*

You fall on their bed as a tangle of limbs, struggling to get out of your clothes without breaking off a kiss. You hope they don’t notice how clumsy you are, how nervous and uncertain, because you’ve never had the chance to do this before, it’s always just been you,

(and him)

all by yourself

(with him)

and to have someone else with you—someone tangible and warm—is ~~new~~

(isn’t right isn’t how it should be isn’t who you should be with how dare you share your body with someone else—)

“Hey,” your bedmate calls, sounding impatient. You’re on top of them, straddling their hips, and you’re completely distracted looking out their window. “What’s your deal?”

“Look, I,” you run a hand through your hair,

(like he would)

trying to calm yourself

(like he would do if he were there if you’d done what you were supposed to why did you leave why did you even try  _ you know better than that, buddy) _

and take their face in your hands. “I need you to be rough,” you say shakily. “Really rough. I, I need to,” not think about him right now, this is your moment, this is all yours; you run out of words

(he steals them).

They look surprised for a second before they recover and smile teasingly. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

You feel them pull you down for a kiss by the back of the neck, and it’s just not the same. It’s not enough. You can’t stay in the present, you’re still being dragged back—

*

—to the little plastic chairs in your guidance counselor’s office, wedged between your parents.

“I just don’t understand,” your mother says quietly. “This kind of thing has never happened before. They never seemed to have trouble getting along with the other kids.”

The counselor nods sagely but presses, “Their teacher has mentioned they have a bit of trouble socializing, though. Have you noticed anything like that?” as if you aren’t even there.

Your parents look at each other anxiously. Your mother stammers something about you never having friends over and your father mentions you stay inside a lot. 

“Excuses,” Strade mutters. “They’re never home. How would they know?”

He stands behind you, clutching the back of your chair hard enough that you hear the plastic bending. 

“The parents of the victim would like the school to take disciplinary action,” the counselor goes on, “but I think your child would benefit more from some guided therapy.” 

“Therapy?” your father balks at the suggestion. “Why? What’s wrong with them?”

“I didn’t say anything was wrong, exactly. But you should consider all of your options.”

Tears burn at the corners of your eyes. “You told me I wouldn’t get in trouble,” you whisper harshly.

“You shouldn’t get in trouble,” Strade says firmly. “It isn’t fair, is it? You just stood up for yourself and now they want to punish you.”

“This is all your fault.”

“It’s not my fault,” he hisses. “We did it together. It wasn’t bad. He had it coming. You thought it was a good idea, too.”

“You’re a liar!”

“Who are you talking to?” your mother asks, and only now do you feel her clutching your shoulder tightly, her voice pitched in panic and her eyes wide. The counselor’s office has fallen silent and everyone is staring at you. 

Your lower lip trembles and you bite down on it, trying not to cry. 

“Sweetheart,” she says, more urgently, “you were talking just now. Who were you talking to?”

The counselor is taking notes. Your father presses a hand to his forehead, looking pale. You’re afraid.

“It...it was Strade,” you whimper.

“Who?”

“It’s Strade,” you say, louder, more confidently. “It’s always him. He always tells me to hurt other people.”

The counselor looks expectantly at your parents. 

“Strade’s an imaginary friend,” your mother says helplessly. “He can’t do things like that, honey. He can’t make you do anything. You can’t blame this on—!”

“It was him!” you yell.

Strade leans over the chair and looks down at you, smiling. You expected him to be mad, but he looks excited.

“He’s the reason I don’t have any friends,” you say shakily. “He doesn't like it when I talk to other kids. He just wants me to talk to him, or he gets mad.” You nervously look down at your hands in your lap, nervously twisting in the fabric of your t-shirt. Strade holds one of your hands, and you feel braver. “But I don't mind,” you say. “Because he's always been there for me. Mom and Dad are gone all the time, but I'm not lonely because he's there when they aren't.”

“You have busy work schedules?” the counselor asks graciously. 

“We’ve never left them alone,” your mother says, even though that wasn't the question. “Not for very long, anyway. We’re very attentive.”

“They've never said they were lonely,” your father adds, glancing at you. 

“This is the first time they've ever said anything like that.”

What began as subdued conversation devolves into anxious shouting, your mother blaming your father’s laziness, and your father blaming your mother’s carelessness. The counselor looks between them at you with heartfelt sympathy and the three of you leave the office with a few phone numbers and a strongly worded suggestion to seek help.

They come around to the idea eventually, but by then, it's much too late.

*

You end up beneath them. It’s easier to let go that way. They press their face into the crook of your neck, nibbling at your throat, and you stare at the ceiling with weary eyes, your arms wrapped around them desperately as an anchor to reality, telling yourself you are not alone.

(But you  _ are _ . He isn’t with you, where he should be, and you’re afraid.)

“Harder,” you say. You want them to leave marks. You want them to draw blood. You want to get him out of you, out of your eyes and your ears and your mind, you want your body to be all yours. “Harder, please, hurt me.”

“You sure?” they ask.

(He wouldn’t have to ask. He always knows what you want, what you need, even before you do.)

“Please,” you beg, and they look wary about it but they do as you ask, they hold your wrists down over your head, they dig their nails into your skin and drag their teeth along your skin, and it’s  _ not enough. _

(It’s not him.)

*

Adolescence is difficult.

You walk into the high school bathroom and catch a couple classmates making out by the sinks. They split and and scurry past you, faces red with embarrassment, and you watch them go enviously. You’ve never dated someone before. You’re starting to think you never will. 

“What’s so bad about that?” Strade asks, a nebulous mass standing beside you, wavering like a heat haze and fluttering like a cloud of gnats. He’s grown just as you have, a good head taller, a great deal more persistent than before. “You don’t mind anyway. You don’t want to date anyone.”

“Maybe I do,” you say.

“Why?” he asks, sounding genuinely confused.

You shrug. “Why not?” 

You’re curious. You’ve spent your life in self-imposed isolation and only ever watched from a distance, and now you want to know what other human beings are like. Your classmates have all started to look at each other in ways they hadn’t before, and you’re no different. You want to know what it feels like when someone kisses you. You want to kiss someone. You want to know what comes after that.

“That’s all?” Strade says with a laugh, and you frown at how trivial he makes your feelings sound. “You’re just curious? I can help you with that, you know.” You start to tell him he can’t, that he’s just going to pass right through you, but he startles you when he rests a flickering, indistinct hand on your shoulder, and it feels real. Not like the ghostly, barely-there touches that you’ve grown accustomed to, not the spine-tingling sensation of him phasing through you, but real, physical touch. You stare, speechless, and meet his eyes to find him smiling.

“I told you,” he says, and he becomes a little clearer, a little sharper at the edges. 

You laugh, a little nervous, a little disbelieving, a little excited. Strade cups your cheek with one hand

(copying the people you saw earlier, you realize, perfectly mirroring their actions)

and you close your eyes in anticipation.

You have heard people say kisses are electric, like a shock running down your spine. You don’t know if this is that. You don’t think it is. You think they mean it feels good, and it does, but you also feel afraid. 

Strade clutches your hair and makes you tilt your head, and it’s more accurate to say he’s  _ taking  _ rather than  _ kissing, _ one-sidedly ravaging your mouth with sharp teeth and a long, cold tongue, stealing your breath. You push at his chest, trying to pull away to take a breath, but he doesn’t let you go. Then he bites you at the corner of your mouth, breaking the skin and tearing a gash in your face down to your chin, and you scream. He lets you go and you sink to your knees, clutching your face with shaking hands and trying to press your fingers to the wound, but you don’t feel any blood. You don’t even find any frayed skin. You look up at him, angry and confused, and he just smiles at you.

You used to like that smile.

“That was your first kiss, wasn’t it?” he asks, as if he didn’t know. “You’re never going to have a better one, you know. No one else will do that to you.”

You refuse to talk to him, grasping the sink to pull yourself upright and getting to your feet. You’re startled to find you’re unharmed when you look in the mirror, your skin unbroken, and rub your fingers over your lips in disbelief.

“You won’t date other people, will you?” 

You can’t believe he’s serious. You leave the bathroom fuming and don’t even look at him, ignoring him for the rest of the day.

He’s right, though. He ruined you. You accidentally stumble onto porn and get an uncomfortable stirring in the pit of your stomach, heat rushing through your body. 

You have to ask Strade to bite you—whimpering and begging, because he pretends he’s mad at you, too—and only then do you cum.

*

They reach climax before you do. You knew they would. As they bask in the afterglow, you lay on your side and face the wall. You think this was a mistake.

“Hey,” they say, “do you want me to…?”

“No,” you tell them. “It’s okay. I should go.”

They don’t try to stop you. They probably think you’re the weirdest lay they’ve ever had, but you don’t care. You hurriedly get dressed and try to find your way back home, tripping over your own feet, vision blurred by your tears, this was stupid, stupid,  _ stupid _ . You can hardly see straight but you still try to run because you really are all alone now and you don’t want that.

*

Like a worm-ridden apple, you are his home and his nourishment, and he’s slowly rotting you from inside.

You curl up under the blankets and squeeze your eyes shut, covering your ears, but you still hear him in your head. 

“I told you,” he’s saying, a weight on the edge of the bed that makes the mattress dip, a cold hand wrenching away the sheets, a cruel smile in the dark. “I told you it would end like that. I told you they were lying to you.”

“I don’t care,” you say, your voice wavering.

(You were never good at lying. He always had to help you do that.)

“They didn’t care about you,” he sneers. “They just wanted someone who wouldn’t put up much of a fight.” He lays a hand on your side, his cold palm smoothing over scrapes and bruises. “And you let them do whatever they wanted because you thought you could replace me.”

His shoves you onto your back and pins your wrists at your sides, his face looming close to yours.

“You don’t get it yet, do you?” he says, his smile falling a bit, sounding almost disappointed. “You can’t get rid of me, buddy. I exist because you exist, like a reflection or a shadow. You can’t trade me for someone else. You’d be giving up something you need.”

He waits, daring you to say you don’t need him. You don’t speak. His smile widens.

“I want my life back,” you say instead. “I want my body to be mine and only mine.”

Strade tilts his head, and you look up at the yellow eyes that once lulled you to sleep as they looked down at you in the dark and feel trapped. You finally recognize the thing that has followed you since birth for what it really is—a monster—when he hisses, “It’s never belonged to you.”

*

Somehow, you make it home, exhausted, head pounding, sore and unsatisfied. You kick off your shoes and drag yourself into the bathroom, shedding clothes on the way. You stare at yourself in the mirror, eyes bloodshot, hickeys dotting your neck and bite marks all along your shoulders. 

He’s going to be mad, you just know it.

(He’s already mad, you can feel it.)

You press your fingertips to the corner of your lips, closing your eyes as you remember what it was like to be kissed for the first time, to kiss someone else, the pain that shot through you and made you weak in the knees. One hand trails down your body between your legs. Even this, the most basic and private of moments, doesn’t belong to you, not really. He has to be a part of it. He has to be at the forefront of your mind or you’ll never really feel whole. You wonder where he ends and you begin.

“You don’t,” he hisses against your ear. “You never begin, and I never end.”

He materializes from shadows—swirling tendrils of darkness and cold air that makes you feel like your blood is freezing in your veins—and appears behind you, holding your gaze in the mirror. He’s waiting for you to explain.

Your mouth goes dry and not a single word comes to mind.

“It was lonely, wasn’t it?” he asks. He runs his fingers over the marks on your skin, cold hands making goosebumps rise along your arms. “It was scary without me there. You wished I was with you. I wished I was there, too.”

You take a shaky breath.

“This body,” he says, raking his claws over you and admiring the scratches he leaves behind, “belongs to both of us.”

You swallow nervously. “Strade,” you start to say, the rest of his name becoming a scream when he grasps you by the back of the head and slams your face into the mirror. It shatters, glass shards raining down over the bathroom sink and all over the floor, embedding themselves in your face. He pulls you back harshly until you’re looking straight up into his eerily glowing eyes.

“You know that already,” he growls, “but you keep doing things like this. To yourself. To me. To us.” He throws you on the floor, your head slamming back on the tile and you whimper when you feel slivers of the mirror digging into your back.

Strade shifts, becoming a swirl of black fog that settles on top of you before congealing into something tangible, his claws sinking into your shoulders. He licks his lips, a lopsided smile spreading across his face even as his voice raises in anger.

“You let them touch you here,” he says, smoothing his hands up your sides suggestively. Your squirming pushes the glass you’re lying on top of further into your skin and you try to stay still, but he notices what you’re doing.

(It’s his body, too, after all. He can feel it.)

“And here.” He traces imaginary patterns across your chest and circles  his fingers around your nipples, coaxing them into hardness.

You arch your back off the floor, pushing yourself into him. He laughs at you.

“And here, too,” he murmurs, lapping at your collarbone and up to the crook of your neck. A pleased sigh involuntarily leaves your lips, and that’s when he chooses to sink his teeth into your flesh before he throws his head back, tearing out a large chunk. Blood spurts from the wound, splattering over the bathroom floor, and your whole body seizes up in pain. You try to push him off of you, but your hands pass right through him. Wisps of him swirl around your wrists, and suddenly your arms are pinned to the ground over your head.

“Stop,” you say weakly, feeling sick as you watch him chewing on your mangled flesh, stringy bits of bloody tissue still connected to your body,

(you are always connected

It is not your body)

dripping thick and viscous black saliva over your chest.

He grins, bits of your skin stuck in his teeth, and holds you down by sinking his claws into your shoulder with one hand and running the other teasingly down your chest. “Apologize to me,” he says huskily.

“I-I’m sorry,” you stammer. “Strade, I didn’t mean—!”

“Ah, ah, ah,” he stops you, stabbing you through the abdomen and wrenching a chunk of flesh free, tossing it into his mouth. You write on the floor, the pain of the glass in your back forgotten in favor the agony of being ripped apart. He chews on it, blood dripping from his chin. “You can’t say you didn’t mean it. A real apology is unconditional.” He crawls over you, covering your body with his rippling, ever-shifting form, his hot breath warming your face along with the coppery stench of your own blood and viscera. “Again,” he urges, yellow eyes wide and filled with excitement.

“I’m sorry,” you say miserably. ”I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“More.”

You can almost see through him when you look down, his claws jamming into the hole in your stomach, moving his hand around beneath your skin, his fingers sliding between your entrails. “I’m s-sorry,” you say weakly as he begins shoving things around inside, the wet squelching of your organs moving loud in the silent room. Blood runs hot and slick down your sides.

Strade lowers his mouth to your neck, his lips running over your hickeys and back up to where he bit you before. He sticks his tongue in the wound and moans against your skin.

You choke on another apology, coughing up blood as it fills your mouth and throat. The sound of Strade’s teeth ripping and tearing into you fills your ears. 

You can’t tell where he ends and you begin, because really, you don’t.

“That’s right,” he says, sounding pleased. “This is our body. You can’t be careless with it.” He runs an ethereal hand over your forehead that feels more like mist than flesh,

and then he’s gone.

You blink, looking around, but you can’t find him. You move to sit up, panic rising up within you like bile. “Strade?” you call nervously.

(but  _ why?  _ Why, after all of that, are you still calling for him?)

You find yourself completely uninjured, your stomach and neck untouched, and discover no glass shards on the floor. There is no blood. There are no gaping holes in your flesh. You take a deep breath and turn to look in the mirror that is no longer broken.

He’s there.

Strade stands behind you in the mirror, his hands draped over your mangled reflection. Your intestines spill from a gaping hole in your abdomen and blood drips from your lips. You watch him thrust a clawed finger into the hole in your stomach and nearly vomit at the pain that shoots through you.

“This is what it feels like when you do those things with other people,” he says. “This is what happens to me.” He rests his chin on your shoulder, smiling. “You have me. Who else do you need?”

He plunges his hand up to the wrist inside of you. You hear blood dripping and feel it on you, even though your body

(his body? your body, collectively,)

is just fine.

“I don’t need anyone,” you say, confident that this is the right answer. Strade rewards you with a smile that makes you tremble in fear.

He presses a hand to your cheek to turn your face towards him, and you hold your breath when he leans in.

(All this time, you thought he needed you to exist.

You never realized it went both ways.)

When he bites you, you feel the same hysteria as someone sitting in the shadow of a total eclipse, the rapid approach of complete, overwhelming darkness and the crescendo of both fear and ecstasy at beholding something otherworldly.

You cum, crying and shuddering.

Your shadow only laughs.


End file.
